The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the authors analyze the geographical dimension of refugee camps in Africa by shedding light on the heterogeneous location patterns of hosting camps across countries as well as the economic settings in which refugee camps are situated, which allows us to...

Venezuela is currently experiencing the biggest crisis in its recent history. This has led to a large increase in emigration. According to recent estimates, there are a total of 5.6 million Venezuelan immigrants worldwide with over one million now living in Peru, which has led to an over 2...

Large arrivals Aof refugees raise concerns about potential tensions with host communities, particularly if refugees are viewed as an out-group competing for limited material resources and crowding out public services. To address this concern, calls have increased to allocate humanitarian aid in...

Globally, both people and economic activity are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Yet, for the vast majority of developing country cities, little is known about the granular spatial organization of such activity despite its key importance to policy and urban planning. This paper adapts a...

Digital technologies can expand access to health services to underserved populations. This paper leverages mobile network expansion and survey data spanning two decades to study the impact of access to mobile phones on infant mortality in Africa. Using plausibly exogenous variations in lightning...

Recent literature suggests that the positive impact of population density on wages, the canonical measure of agglomeration effects, is multiples higher in developing countries than in advanced economies. This poses an urban productivity puzzle because on-the-ground observations do not suggest...

This paper examines the effects of a negative macroeconomic shock on the financial performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in infrastructure. It exploits the differential effects of a drastic fall in oil prices (in 2014-15) on SOEs in energy-rich countries relative to SOEs in...

Evidence for road expansion and electrification as drivers of job creation is limited and mixed, with most studies having considered either one or the other, and only in isolation. This paper estimates the average and heterogeneous impacts of road and electricity investments and the interaction...

This paper studies the effect of a change in the amount of cash assistance provided to Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan on household outcomes post-return. Using a regression discontinuity design, it measures the impact of a large exogenous change in cash assistance amounts on post-return...

This paper examines the factors that are associated with boys' underachievement in mathematics and science in Saudi Arabia, where students attend gender-segregated schools from grade 1 onward, as well as student achievement in these two subjects in grades 4 and 8 more generally. The paper...